Politics & Power Quote by Branford Marsalis

Marsalis isn`t just scolding teenagers; he`s indicting an entire American sensory habit: we treat music as something to be consumed with our eyes. The pivot from "hear" to "see" is a small linguistic tell that carries a lot of cultural weight. It captures how concerts have drifted from an auditory practice into an event economy built on spectacle, status, and proof-of-attendance. You don`t buy a ticket to be changed by sound; you buy one to witness a moment you can narrate later.

The line "they come by it honestly" is the sharpest move here. It refuses the lazy generational panic that blames kids for cultural decline and relocates responsibility upstream: a society trained by TV, advertising, and now social media to skim rather than dwell. Listening, in Marsalis`s sense, is not passive reception but active attention - the kind jazz demands, with its internal conversations, sudden turns, and meaning made in real time. If you`re treating the stage like a photo op, you miss the point of improvisation, which is presence.

There`s also a quiet defense of musicianship embedded in the complaint. In an era where branding can outrun craft, "seeing" becomes a substitute for evaluating what you`re actually hearing: time, tone, risk, interplay. Marsalis is mourning a lost contract between artist and audience - not nostalgia for some golden age, but the idea that music is an art you meet halfway, not a backdrop you document.